FACT CHECK: Did Robert E. Lee Oppose Slavery?

After white nationalists protested the City of Charlottesville’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza claimed Sunday that Lee opposed slavery.

While Lee disagreed with slavery in an abstract sense, he held views similar to his pro-slavery contemporaries and criticized abolitionists of his day.

D’Souza claimed in a tweet that Lee, a Confederate general during the Civil War, was a poor example of the evils of slavery.

The claim is counterintuitive – Lee owned slaves, and he fought for the Confederacy in a rebellion that was, in part, predicated on slavery.

The notion that Lee opposed slavery has roots in Southern folklore. “This is a little bit of white washing of his image that took place after the Civil War when he was resurrected as a hero of the Lost Cause – as somebody who was very honorable, a great military general and also somebody who morally opposed slavery,” Manisha Sinha, American History professor at the University of Connecticut, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

TheDCNF reached out to D’Souza’s press manager who cited a letter written by Lee in which he called slavery a “moral and political evil.”

Although Lee called slavery evil, he believed God had ordained it for a divine purpose that would eventually end. Lee made it clear in his letter that he opposed human intervention into what he considered heavenly matters.

“While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day,” Lee wrote.

Like many slaveholders, Lee believed that God ordained slavery to “civilize” the black race and that black people heavily benefited from the institution.

“The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially,” Lee wrote. “The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.”

The argument was based upon the white supremacist idea that black people were morally, intellectually and even physically inferior to the white race.

“This notion that people of African descent were made good slaves – that they needed to be schooled into civilization was an odd argument because it was a school from which they could never graduate,” Sinha told TheDCNF. “So even after people had been here for centuries and generations, were Christianized, were civilized by Southern standards, even then they were not deemed civilized enough to be liberated.”

The positive good argument of slavery – the idea that paternalistic whites were actually helping inferior blacks by enslaving them – helped solidify a moral argument in the minds of many Southerners that slavery was permissible.

“There was a strain of pro-slavery thinking in Virginia that saw slavery as kind of an evil necessity, but a necessity nonetheless,” Sinha said. “And you can trace this back to the Revolutionary Era where there were people who expressed qualms about slavery in the abstract, but continued to enslave African-Americans, using sometimes sort of racist arguments to justify their enslavement.”

This way of thinking contributed to the notion that white slave masters were burdened by the duty to “civilize” black people, and Lee argues that whites, not blacks, suffered the greatest evils of slavery.

“I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race,” Lee wrote in his letter. “While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former.”

Although Lee ruminates on the welfare of black slaves, it was ultimately the interests of white slaveholders that took precedence in his view of abolition. Lee criticized abolitionists for their interference in Southern affairs, and argued that “to benefit the slave he must not excite angry feelings in the master.”

To argue that he was against slavery because he abstractly called it a “moral and political evil” ignores the fact that he not only believed the institution should continue but practiced it himself. In reality, the views espoused by Lee were much the same as those perpetuated by pro-slavery apologists of his time.

“He very much thought right down the line – the pro-slavery line,” Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who studied Lee’s personal collection of letters, explained in a talk on the matter.

Two comments to this “fact” check: 1) the continuing degradation of current African self-rule, which has devolved into horrific primitive tribal violence and mass murder, is indicative and living proof of the projected outcome of the “unschooled” native Africans vs. the generations of freed American slaves who have risen.

2.) the Left’s constant harping that the only slavery in the Colonies were blacks is a monstrous lie. The fact is, that before the Civil War slaves and indentured servants were considered personal property, and they and/or their descendants could be sold or inherited like any other personal property. Human chattel, indentured or otherwise was governed largely by laws of individual states. And it is very important to note that because of that, the terms of indenture could and were nearly always extended into more than 20 years from the initial contract, and that the owners had total arbitrary and judicial control over the term and its extensions.
This is a point neatly avoided by the great perpetual claimants of victimhood of “slavery”. Indentured servants, who were literally worked to death on plantations (white indentured European servants). Fully one-half to two-thirds of the immigrants who came to the American colonies arrived as indentured servants, and most did not ever claw their way out of permanent poverty and virtual slavery. The Constitution, which is castigated by the “blacks are the only slaves” upheld the indentured servant system which was instigated by the Crown (UK) to clear the streets of England of its “scum”. One was sentenced to “gallows” or “transportation to the Colonies” which included little children/street urchins of London.
This is the truth, and was ongoing for more than 20 years before the first 20 black indentured servants (claimed by historians to be slaves) were landed and their contracts sold in Jamestown,VA.
So, the hated “whitey” in America- if their ancestry is Colonial America, were in fact largely servants/chattel slaves, first appearing in Jamestown in 1607 long before, and then contemporaneous with the actual slave trade begun in Massachussetts in 1640, and legalized in 1664 in New Jersey and New York.

The first “slaves” in the Americas where whites, and you will never hear anything about them in the PC world of fake history. No white privilege among these living permanent servants.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/09/0907_smithgenlee.html

Opinion: U.S. Racists Dishonor Robert E. Lee by Association

Edward C. Smith

September 7, 2001

Historian Edward C. Smith contends that General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces in the Civil War, is being dishonored by racists who claim to revere him while also harboring racist sentiments towards blacks. Lee, says Smith, “would not want them, of all people, serving as the self-annointed guardians of his memory.”

The American Civil War—the single most significant event in all of U.S. history—began on April 12, 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor.

The war ended exactly four years later to the day on April 12, 1865 with the formal “stacking of arms” by the defeated confederate soldiers at Appomattox Courthouse.

Three days earlier General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army to General Ulysses S. Grant on Palm Sunday April 9.

Appomattox Courthouse is a simple little village in central Virginia nearly a hundred miles (160 kilometers) west of Richmond. Visiting the site is a very moving experience. One can almost see the ghosts of the men who were present at the surrender ceremony, knowing that never again in their lives would they witness such a momentous event.

For the South, the central figure in the great conflict was none other than Robert E. Lee.

Two of Lee’s ancestors signed the declaration of Independence. His father, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, was George Washington’s Chief of Staff during the Revolutionary War. And his wife, Mary Custis, was George Washington’s foster great-granddaughter.

Suffice it to say there was no American family for whom The Union meant more to than the Lees. Nonetheless, like so many others throughout the country (especially in the South), Lee’s loyalty went first and foremost to his state. Consequently, when Virginia left the Union he felt compelled to resign his commission in the United States army—where he had served for more than 30 years—and offered his services to the new army of the Confederate States of America.

Abraham Lincoln was elected on November 4, 1860 and was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. Between his election and inauguration 117 days had elapsed, and during that time in the South a whole new nation had come into existence. The Constitution was entirely silent on the subject of secession. The seceding states earnestly believed that since each one had voluntarily entered into the Union, they reserved for themselves their right—as sovereign political entities—to voluntarily exit from the Union.

Lest we forget, South Carolina left alone and could only hope that other states would follow her lead—and of course ten additional states eventually did, most notably among them was Virginia.

General Lee only fought twice outside of Virginia (where 60 percent of all Civil War battles were waged) and those battles were at Antietam in Maryland (the single bloodiest day in American history) on September 17, 1862, and at the three-day battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, July 1 through July 3, which produced more than 50,000 casualties.

While the North gloriously celebrated July 4, 1863, the South deeply mourned. Not only had it been decisively defeated at Gettysburg, but after a siege of several months, General Grant finally captured—on that same day—the vital town of Vicksburg. The capitulation of Vicksburg literally cut the Confederacy in half. Thus, Union forces controlled the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Louisiana.

Robert E. Lee was a deeply religious man, believing that the hand of God was present in all human affairs. He and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson had achieved a splendid victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863. Chancellorsville is approximately 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Richmond.

Unfortunately, General Jackson was mortally wounded at night after the battle, mistakenly by his own men. When Lee learned of this he was understandably crushed. They were both West Point graduates, veterans of the Mexican War, and proud Virginians who had evolved into intimate soul mates.

As an aside, I remember reading many years ago that when General George S. Patton (whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy) was reinstated as commander of the American Third Army in Europe, he wrote a letter of gratitude to General Eisenhower in which he said, “Ike, from now on over here you are Lee and I am your Jackson.”

Lee Pleaded with God to spare Jackson’s life and when he died on May 10, Lee was devastated. Could it possibly be that Jackson’s death, only weeks before the Gettysburg campaign, was a divine message to him that he was fighting for the wrong cause?

Interestingly, on May 11, 1864, the day after the first anniversary of Jackson’s death, General Jeb Stuart, who in Lee’s hierarchy was second only to Jackson, was mortally wounded at the Battle of Yellow Tavern and died the following day. For Lee these terrible losses were hardly coincidental. He believed that the Almighty had spoken, and clearly not in his favor.

Thus, General Lee entered into the final months of the war without his two most important subordinate commanders. Most of the soldiers continued to bravely fight on, no longer for “country,” however, but for Lee. For so many of them he was “the country.”

Nonetheless, the Army of Northern Virginia was becoming unglued through desertion because so many in the ranks were losing a soldier’s greatest weapon, the will to win, and so many began to sense the inevitability of imminent defeat.

Lee, the epitome of the image of the noble, chivalric cavalier, accepted the loss of the quest for Southern independence with extraordinary grace. With so much of the South wantonly destroyed, he, more so than the vast majority of embittered and vengeful Southerners, knew that the war ended with much more than Northern victory and reunification.

Through victory an entirely new social order was to be established that would alter the relationship between the races forever. Unlike so many other Southerners, Lee embraced the new order. After peace had been achieved through unconditional surrender, the South became a vast, heavily occupied military zone with black Union soldiers seemingly everywhere.

One Sunday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, a well-dressed, lone black man, whom no one in the community—white or black—had ever seen before, had attended the service, sitting unnoticed in the last pew.

Just before communion was to be distributed, he rose and proudly walked down the center aisle through the middle of the church where all could see him and approached the communion rail, where he knelt. The priest and the congregation were completely aghast and in total shock.

No one knew what to do…except General Lee. He went to the communion rail and knelt beside the black man and they received communion together—and then a steady flow of other church members followed the example he had set.

After the service was over, the black man was never to be seen in Richmond again. It was as if he had been sent down from a higher place purposefully for that particular occasion.

Today, and deservingly so, Lee is honored throughout the country. Only Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln exceed him in monuments and memorials.

Unfortunately there are many Southerners who claim to cherish Lee and revere the flag for which he so nobly fought but still harbor rabidly racist sentiments towards blacks and their long delayed social progress. Such people do not honor Lee, instead they disgrace him.

Lee absolutely never felt what these modern Southerners continue to feel—and certainly he would not want them, of all people, serving as the self-annointed guardians of his memory. His lasting legacy, in his own words, is, “Before and during the War Between the States I was a Virginian. After the war I became an American.”

To be an American, at least for Lee, meant to embrace the new social order that the war had established and that the Constitution had codified through the addition of three new amendments which abolished slavery (13th) in 1865, made blacks citizens (14th) in 1868, and awarded black males the right to vote (15th) in 1870.

The last five years of Lee’s life were happily spent as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia. He died on October 12, 1870, having witnessed before his death the passing of the past and the birth of a whole new and more equitable America. For the first time Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence, written nearly a century before, had finally become reality.

Professor Edward C. Smith is the director of American Studies at American University, Washington, D.C., and co-director of The Civil War Institute. He is a regular columnist for National Geographic News and speaker in the National Geographic Society lecture program. He also leads interpretative tours of Civil War sites and other historic locations.

Anyone can edit a WIKI.

Maybe so, but the info in that brief Wiki excerpt I posted was footnoted [2] to the following piece from the National Park Service.
______________________________

Slavery at White Haven

Many visitors to Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site are surprised to learn that slaves lived and worked on the nineteenth century farm known as White Haven. During the years 1854 to 1859 Grant lived here with his wife, Julia, and their children, managing the farm for his father-in-law, Colonel Dent. At that time no one suspected that Grant would rise from obscurity to achieve the success he gained during the Civil war. However, his experience working alongside the White Haven slaves may have influenced him in his later roles as the Union general who won the war which abolished that “peculiar institution,” and as President of the United States. The interpretation of slavery at White Haven is therefore an important part of the mission of this historic site.

The Setting

Most slaveholders in Missouri owned few slaves; those who owned ten were considered wealthy. In the southeastern Bootheel area and along the fertile Missouri River valley known as “little Dixie,” large, single-crop plantations predominated, with an intensive use of slave labor. Elsewhere in the state, large farms produced a variety of staples, including hemp, wheat, oats, hay, and corn. On many of these estates the owner worked alongside his slaves to harvest the greatest economic benefit from the land. Slavery was less entrenched in the city of St. Louis, where the African American population was 2% in 1860, down from 25% in 1830. Slaves were often “hired out” by their masters in return for an agreed upon wage. A portion of the wage was sometimes paid to slaves, allowing a measure of self-determination and in some cases the opportunity to purchase their freedom.

Early Farm Residents and Slavery

Each of the farm’s early residents owned slaves during their tenure on the Gravois property. When Theodore and Anne Lucas Hunt purchased William Lindsay Long’s home in 1818, there existed “several good log cabins” on the property—potential quarters for the five slaves purchased earlier by Hunt. The work of Walace, Andrew, Lydia, Loutette, and Adie would be an important part of the Hunts’ farming venture. The Hunts sold the Gravois property to Frederick Dent in 1820, for the sum of $6,000. Naming the property “White Haven” after his family home in Maryland, Colonel Dent considered himself a Southern gentleman with slaves to do the manual labor of caring for the plantation. By the 1850s, eighteen slaves lived and worked at White Haven.

Growing Up as a Slave

In 1830, half of the Dent slaves were under the age of ten. Henrietta, Sue, Ann, and Jeff, among others, played with the Dent children. Julia Dent recalled that they fished for minnows, climbed trees for bird nests, and gathered strawberries. However, the slave children also had chores such as feeding chickens and cows, and they mastered their assigned tasks as the white children went off to school. Returning home from boarding school, Julia noted the transition from playmate to servant. She noted that the slave girls had “attained the dignity of white aprons.” These aprons symbolized slave servitude, a departure from the less structured days of childhood play.

Household Responsibilities

Adult slaves performed many household chores on the Dent plantation. Kitty and Rose served as nurses to Julia and Emma, while Mary Robinson became the family cook. The wide variety of foods prepared in her kitchen were highly praised by Julia: “Such loaves of beautiful snowy cake, such plates full of delicious Maryland biscuit, such exquisite custards and puddings, such omelettes, gumbo soup, and fritters.” A male slave named “Old Bob,” who traveled with the Dents from Maryland in 1816, had the responsibility to keep the fires going in White Haven’s seven fireplaces. Julia thought Bob was careless to allow the embers to die out, as this forced him “to walk a mile to some neighbors and bring home a brand of fire from their backlog.” Such “carelessness” provided Bob and many other slaves an opportunity to escape their masters’ eyes.

Tending the Farm

Slave labor was used extensively in the farming and maintenance of the 850-acre plantation. Utilizing the “best improvements in farm machinery” owned by Colonel Dent, field hands plowed, sowed and reaped the wheat, oats, Irish potatoes, and Indian corn grown on the estate. Slaves also cared for the orchards and gardens, harvesting the fruits and vegetables for consumption by all who lived on the property. During Grant’s management of the farm he worked side by side with Dan, one of the slaves given to Julia at birth. Grant, along with Dan and other slaves, felled trees and took firewood by wagon to sell to acquaintances in St. Louis. More than 75 horses, cattle, and pigs required daily attention, while grounds maintenance and numerous remodeling projects on the main house and outbuildings utilized the skills of those in servitude.

Personal Lives

Slaves claimed time for socializing amidst their chores. Corn shuckings provided one opportunity to come together as a community to eat, drink, sing, and visit, often including slaves from nearby plantations. Participation in religious activities, individually or as a group, also provided a sense of integrity. Julia remembered “Old Bob” going into the meadow to pray and sing. According to historian Lorenzo J. Greene, “St. Louis…was the only place in the state where the organized black church achieved any measure of success.” Whether or not the Dent slaves were allowed to attend services is unknown.

Freedom

In Mary Robinson’s July 24, 1885, recollections, during an interview for the St. Louis Republican memorial to Grant following his death, she noted that “he always said he wanted to give his wife’s slaves their freedom as soon as he was able.” In 1859, Grant freed William Jones, the only slave he is known to have owned. During the Civil War, some slaves at White Haven simply walked off, as they did on many plantations in both Union and Confederate states. Missouri’s constitutional convention abolished slavery in the state in January 1865, freeing any slaves still living at White Haven.

“I Ulysses S. Grant…do hereby manumit, emancipate and set free from Slavery my Negro man William, sometimes called William Jones…forever.”

Further Reading:
Casey, Emma Dent. “When Grant Went A-Courtin’.” Unpublished manuscript, Ulysses S. Grant NHS collection.

Grant, Julia Dent. The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant). Southern Illinois University Press, 1988.
Greene, Lorenzo, et al. Missouri’s Black Heritage. University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Hurt, R. Douglas. Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie. University of Missouri Press, 1992.
Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House. University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Wade, Richard C. Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820-1860. Oxford University Press, 1964.

https://www.nps.gov/ulsg/learn/historyculture/slaveryatwh.htm

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